We had several tinkers, tailors, paper shredder, knife station, and a table with Carter Wallace from Institute for Urban Ecology. There were approximately 40 attendees and 40 repairs that day.

A popular fun station was Don’s “Repair Your Hair” station, where he did haircut touch-ups and trims. One fellow brought a pair of pants with a zipper problem that Mary fixed in a jiffy. Then he noticed the Hair Repair. When he realized that it was also free he signed up for that, then he took a garden tour with January. After he sampled the potluck array and some of Wafic’s iced tea, he looked delighted and a little incredulous to learn that he was also welcome to help himself to the huge pile of citrus from the Neighborhood Fruit Harvest. He checked out the Seed and Seedling Swap and left with a big smile, repaired trousers, a dapper new hair repair, some fruit, and a seedling.

He also left with a new understanding, a first hand experience of the sense of abundance that can thrive even without money. It is the acknowledgement that wealth can be found in many ways.

If you have experienced this feeling and want to pay it forward, consider volunteering for Repair Café as a repair person or a staff triage person.

Thanks all who turned out to share skills and to all the patrons who came to sample the benefits of an alternate sharing economy and time banking.

— Therese Brummel

A recent phone interview by a Stanford University post-doc asked me to answer deeper and deeper questions on the foundations and motivations of the work we all contribute to Repair Café, tinkers, tailors, organizers and participants.

I answered the top layers easily: raising zero waste consciousness, decreasing the landfill, decreasing consumerism. I proudly spouted some permaculture principles. She was researching and writing on Maker Culture primarily based on sharing hardware and software in the computer world. She was hunting for tendrils of linkage to the growing world of volunteer repair people who were sharing skills not related to cyberspace.

Then she took me to another level beneath those answers and I heard myself talking about  sharing skills, sharing friendship, finding abundance locally, building community, healing the earth. She was a sociologist so I felt comfort discussing this level with her.